coaltide | Coal Rivalry

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2025

Coal Rivalry

All the things Coal said, running through my head.

Yuletide Discord for Hippos & Exchanges After Dark for namespace ~~drama~~ 18+ discussion.

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I would bet that Yuletide mods will never do more than double assign their recips and maybe gently suggest that they get a beta.

CYRT

Oh I agree, sadly. It just pisses me off to see this person being allowed to shove their ramblings at people year after year. Making anyone receive them is rude even if there was a backup gift. "Here's a bag of steaming turd, ok great, and here's a normal gift, you barely even smell the other one! Enjoy!"

Instead of double-assigning random people they need to start soarcing reliable bad actors.

Soarcing?

DC

Soarc was the name of a mod-made account that was used to contain the socktopus accounts. They assigned all the socks to create for Soarc.

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-26 19:33 (UTC) - Expand

No, the mods need to ban them.

This is correct. SOARC is a very limited-use strategy for when someone thinks all of a particular cluster are the same sock but can't be sure. Ie when banning a large group of people might catch some innocent accounts up in the net.

If someone's going to deliver an unsuitable gift and the mods know it, then it's banning time.

I'd go further and say there need to be bare minimum standards, rather than waiting for repeated disasters to stack up enough for a ban. Lots of exchanges say that art can't be on lined paper. Works having to manage basic SPAG should be the same.

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-27 07:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-27 07:28 (UTC) - Expand

...How many years have they been around? This is my first Yuletide and reading the fic I would assume they were like 12. (Not least because they keep on mentioning their elementary school in their notes. Who still remembers and talks about elementary school in that much detail?!)

Check the date on their profile and weep.

Damn...

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-27 08:07 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-27 08:11 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-27 08:26 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-27 09:47 (UTC) - Expand

Given how many times Bean10 has already done this, yeah, mods aren't going to do anything.

I was double assigned to the only person who requested that fandom. I'm not sure how I feel about being in this position. If I were my recip I would be pretty upset if I received something that so clearly deserves refusal. I really hope what I wrote makes up for it enough and their yuletide hasn't been completely soured.

I'm sorry you were put in that position, coalie. I don't think it's quite fair of the mods to double assign in cases like this. It really does put too much pressure on the other writer, who might be caught in the crossfire if the recip, for example, was so soured by the shitty fic that they aren't in the best frame of mind moving onto their other gift.

I do wish mods would just ban some people. There's giving new/inexperienced writers a chance (my own fic was by someone I expect is inexperienced at writing, but they so obviously put so much love and care into their fic that I don't mind), and then there's this.

CYRT

Ahhh it's okay. I wrote multiple fics this year so even if the recip is so bummed out they need to disengage, I'm still getting that dopamine feedback on the others. I'm low key wondering if I was a manual assignment as a known treater whose writing-eggs would be in multiple baskets.

As someone who once got double-assigned for a yuletide bad egg writer, I don't even remember what the other fic I got was that year, all I remember was how bad that fic was.

Not the same but I wrote a treat once for someone who got coal (not from the usual suspects) and tbh I don't think my fic was super good but I was extremely glad to have written it, and the recip seemed to appreciate it a lot. I think it's fine. Getting 1 bad fic can feel awful if it's your only one, but if it isn't, it becomes a funny anecdote.

As someone who's been a recipient like this, I'm still waiting for it to become a funny anecdote. Easy for you to say it's funny if you were the one writing the decent gift, not the one who had to receive and deal with the shit gift.

+1

I still remember the terrible gifts I got that were my only gifts in whatever exchange they were for, but the ones where I got another gift that I enjoyed are merely footnotes.

-1. I only remember the bad ones and have forgotten the good "and also, here's your real gift"s

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-26 23:06 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-26 23:29 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-27 00:16 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-27 00:48 (UTC) - Expand

+1 I'm one of the people who was whining on here yesterday morning but then I got an excellent 900+ word Madness gift and now I'm feeling much more charitable about my main gift too.

Re: Actual Coal (or, what were they thinking)

(Anonymous) - 2025-12-26 20:54 (UTC) - Expand

For some people, they're going to be stressed out by the fact people are watching their reaction and popcorning while debating how they handled it. The second gift doesn't undo the rest of it.